The top 5 technology panics of 2009
A draft article for H+ Magazine , circulated to the SIAI 2009 intern list for editing. The published version was later picked up by Slashdot. The piece runs a countdown of overheated tech scares from 2009, contrasting each with the actual evidence.
#5: Exploding iPods The Technology Apple iPods and iPhones contain a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, one of the most efficient batteries yet developed. A lithium battery can carry more than three times the energy of an old-fashioned nickel-cadmium battery.
The Panic Lithium is a pretty reactive element, and under the right conditions, a lithium-ion battery can rapidly heat up if there’s a short circuit. This can cause iPhones, iPods, and other electronic devices to spontaneously explode — the heat makes the display shatter, turning your cool new touchscreen into a blizzard of dangerous shrapnel. It can also make anything nearby catch fire; one Dutch man’s iPhone even burned a hole right through his car seat. Every iPhone out there is really an incendiary bomb in disguise, waiting for the right moment to go off and wreak havoc on techno-geeks and music lovers the world over.
The Reality While lithium batteries have been known to do some unpleasant things, these incidents are, on the whole, incredibly rare. Only a handful of malfunctions have been reported, out of the tens of millions of Apple products sold worldwide every year. You’re probably more likely to win the lottery or get struck by lightning than your phone is to explode. The Consumer Product Safety Commission investigated the matter, and found only fifteen incidents nationwide, none of which caused serious injury. They concluded that the risk of an accident is “very low.”
#4: Robots Attack The Technology Workplaces, particularly factories, are becoming increasingly automated. A large percentage of consumer products are never touched by human hands before they are bought — they are manufactured, assembled, and distributed entirely by robots. This revolution in production has allowed all of us to lead lives of comparative luxury, with toys undreamt of by nineteenth-century kings.
The Panic A Swedish worker was nearly killed by a factory robot in April, while attempting to perform maintenance on it. He thought that the robot — a machine used for lifting heavy rocks — was turned off… until it grabbed his head, attempting to crush him with its pincer-like robot arms. He managed to fight it off, but only after being heavily injured, suffering four broken ribs and a number of bruises. Can armies of vengeful Terminators, bent on the annihilation of the human race, be far behind?
The Reality Factory work is simply dangerous, and it always has been, ever since the Industrial Revolution began two hundred years ago. Indeed, most workplaces have gotten much safer over the years; as any student of nineteenth-century history will tell you, there used to be no safety regulations at all, and people routinely had body parts crushed by machines without warning labels or safety guards. Robots themselves have been a tremendous help to us, doing the dirty and dangerous work so a human doesn’t have to.
#3: “Sexting” The Technology Cellphones with texting capability, a camera, and wireless Internet have become increasingly ubiquitous over the past five years, with tens of millions in use in the US alone.
The Panic Studies show that millions of people, all over the country, are using these cellphones to take sexually explicit photos of children, and then distribute them to their friends. And the primary allure of the cellphone — its portability and user friendliness — makes it extremely easy to get and send pornographic images of anyone. Are we in the middle of the largest child porn epidemic in our nation’s history?
The Reality The vast majority of these “child pornographers” are… the children themselves, who are taking nude photos of themselves and their girlfriends and boyfriends, and sending them off to their classmates at school. Teenagers have always been more sexually active than their parents and teachers would like to think, and the most recent generation is no exception. However, under child pornography statutes, it makes no difference if you’re under eighteen yourself, or even if they’re your own pictures — it’s still a crime, and a number of teens have been brought up on felony sex offender charges just for having such photos stored on their phones. The Vermont legislature has recently introduced a bill that would legalize such photos, as long as the participants are willing and between the ages of 13 and 18, hopefully bringing some much-needed sanity to this panic.
#2: Bombing the Moon The Technology NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft, which was launched on June 18th, 2009, and sent on a mission to the Moon, with the goal of confirming the presence of water ice in the Moon’s permanently shadowed polar regions.
The Panic LCROSS will investigate the Moon, not by landing on it, but by doing something rather more spectacular: smashing a projectile into the Moon’s polar region, and then analyzing the resulting impact plume. The plume will even be visible from Earth, with a reasonably sized amateur telescope. When LCROSS launched, numerous reports came out about how NASA was “bombing the Moon”, in violation of the Outer Space Treaty, and that LCROSS was a “lunar missile.” Conspiracy theorists even claimed that it was a ploy by the government to antagonize an alien base on the far side.
The Reality NASA’s “missile” isn’t a bomb, an explosive, a nuke, or indeed anything special at all — it’s just an old, burnt-out rocket stage without any fuel left. It’s tiny compared to the Moon: the rocket stage weighs around two tons, while the Moon weighs in at a rather more hefty 73,477,000,000,000,000,000 tons. And, while it is a violation of international law to put nuclear weapons in space, there’s nothing wrong with colliding a spacecraft into a celestial body. We’ve done it a zillion times before, from the early days of space exploration in the 1960s, to last June, when Japan’s Kaguya probe ended its life with a bang.
#1: Flesh-Eating Robots The Technology Cyclone Power Technologies’ “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot”, or EATR, a steam-powered robot developed under a grant from the Pentagon and intended for use by the military.
The Panic Engineers hope that EATR will be able to power itself for months at a time, by roaming around the battlefield autonomously, and consuming “organic matter” to feed its engine. Once the machine is released, it will chomp up everything in its path, from plants, to animals, to the bodies of fallen soldiers, and relentlessly consume them to sate its insatiable thirst for fuel. It even comes with a chainsaw… perhaps to help it slice us up into more manageable pieces before it feasts upon our flesh?
The Reality After the rumors started making their way around the Internet, EATR’s designers stepped in to clarify: the “flesh-eating robot” will consume vegetable matter only, and it comes equipped with a suite of sensors and computers to help it determine whether the things it comes across are animal, vegetable, or neither. After all, desecration of the dead is against the laws of war, and plant matter is a much better fuel source anyway — there are a lot more bushes just lying around to feast upon than human bodies.